Philomena and the back story of a D.C. insider

If Hess was consumed by anything, it was his search for his biological mother. | Courtesy image

Sixsmith depicts the elder Hess as a martinet, and by the end of Michael’s life, the two were essentially estranged. “Doc” Hess learned only after his son’s death that Michael was both gay and had been struggling with AIDS. “It was a situation where the family just didn’t know this whole other part of his life,” recalled Robert Higdon, one of Hess’s closest friends and the former executive director of the Prince of Wales Foundation in Washington.

In Sixsmith’s telling, Hess’s first political experience was as a teenage Senate page for the Republican minority leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois. But by the time he had graduated from Notre Dame and earned a law degree at George Washington University, and was working as a staff lawyer at the National Institute of Municipal Law Officers, a nonpartisan group (now known as the International Municipal Lawyers Association) that offers legal advice to local governments, he had become a supporter of Jimmy Carter’s reelection in 1980.

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At the same time, however, he had become an expert in the arcane field of legislative redistricting. After Ronald Reagan’s election — and disillusioned by Carter’s defeat — he was looking for new opportunities and was recruited by the RNC to help reverse decades of gerrymandering by state legislatures that had protected white Democrats at the expense of both Republicans and racial and ethnic minorities. The reasons for his political conversion are not entirely clear. But Dahllof noted: “He always said, ‘What other job could I have in which I get to argue in front of the Supreme Court?’”

The Republicans’ strategy — fought out in a series of controversial court cases and legislation in the 1980s and ’90s — was to “pack” black and Latino voters into super-concentrated congressional districts that all but guaranteed the election of racial minorities but made the remaining districts newly competitive for Republicans.

“It was the ‘outs’ making common cause against the ‘ins,’” said E. Mark Braden, one of Hess’s mentors and predecessors as chief counsel at the RNC. “You created majority-minority districts, and the leavings were often friendly to Republicans. By effectively electing more black members, you blew up the established system and permitted the election of Republicans. You blew up a lot of white Democratic incumbents and scrambled the eggs.”

Critics of the practice argue that it has also diluted black electoral influence by diminishing the number of multiracial districts in which black candidates might have a chance of winning, creating safe Republican seats instead. But all agree that the strategy was a crucial component in the Republicans’ takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994 and of the party’s enduring dominance in House races since.

When Benjamin Ginsberg, perhaps the Republicans’ pre-eminent election lawyer, became chief counsel in 1989, he asked Hess to remain his deputy. “I really wanted him to stay on because he had an encyclopedic and legendary knowledge about redistricting,” Ginsberg recalled. “He was a calm, gentle soul. He was a very good guy to work with, very well-liked within the building.”

When Ginsberg left the RNC for private practice in 1993, Hess succeeded him as chief counsel, but within a year or so, he received his HIV diagnosis. Higdon noted that this was after newly reported AIDS cases had crested among affluent gay men but before anti-retroviral therapies for the disease were widely available to prolong life. “By then, either you had it or you didn’t,” Higdon said. “Michael just never got healthy again after he was diagnosed.”

Sixsmith’s book portrays Hess as carousing in biker bars, but Dahllof said the reality was much tamer. The couple, who lived in the Wyoming Apartments in the Kalorama section of Washington, bought a cabin in Shepherdstown, W.Va., and worked weekends rebuilding it. “We became residents of the country to have a quiet life.”

Dahllof, Higdon and Hess’s other friends and co-workers all resist tendencies in the book and movie to caricature or pigeonhole him as a gay man, or a Republican, or anything else. He was, above all, they say, a whole person. He followed Notre Dame football zealously but also cooked homemade chutneys that won prizes at the Shepherdstown fair. He spun music mixes not only in clubs around town, but also for his friends on a Friday or Saturday night at home.

“He had an insatiable curiosity and would read voraciously — from Spin magazine to the American Bar Association magazine to the Village Voice,” Dahllof said. “He could discuss anything — and in some detail — from sports scores to international politics.”

Braden, the former RNC counsel, said he was aware of Hess’s search for his mother in Ireland. “We talked a little about how you would do it, sort of the notion of whether it made sense.”

In those days of the Internet’s functional infancy, Hess left no stone unturned, poring over Irish records and twice visiting the Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea.

“We spent so many cold, damp, drizzly days in Ireland looking for his mother,” recalled Dahllof, who is known in the book and movie by the pseudonym Pete Nilsson . “He knew her last name was Lee. He would think maybe we’d run across her. Every time we’d see a cemetery, he’d stop and look for her name. At the abbey, the nuns were incredibly hospitable and nice and sweet. They just said they didn’t have any records, which I guess was true. But we later learned that they’d had a bonfire to burn the records.”

Hess’s funeral was held at St. Peter’s Catholic Church on Capitol Hill, on a blisteringly hot day in August 1995. Mark Braden recalled: “One of the lines I can remember that I said is, ‘We should be singing the Notre Dame fight song, rather than all these hymns.’’’

“It was just so sad,” Robert Higdon added. “I remember thinking: His mother will never know who her son is.”

Thanks to Hess’s dying wish, that turned out not to be true, because he asked Dahllof to have his ashes buried at Sean Ross Abbey. With help of friends on the board of a Catholic charity — the World Mercy Fund — and a generous contribution to the sisters, Dahllof did just that.

And in 2004, in an overgrown cemetery near the ruins of a former monastery, that is where Philomena Lee found a simple headstone of black marble, bearing these words: “Michael A. Hess. A Man of Two Nations and Many Talents. Born July 5, 1952, Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea. Died August 15, 1995, Washington, DC, USA.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the year Michael Hess was born. It was 1952.